Prince William, Prince George, Catherine and Princess Charlotte will be spending Christmas with the Middletons this year. Photo / Getty Images
Prince William, Prince George, Catherine and Princess Charlotte will be spending Christmas with the Middletons this year. Photo / Getty Images
That tricky issue facing couples the world over concerning whose family to go to for Christmas lunch has never applied to the Queen. Everyone joins her at Sandringham, sitting down promptly at 1.15pm in the green-walled dining room hung with Spanish tapestries and rising after just over an hour to be in good time to watch her annual message on TV to the Commonwealth at 3pm.
So it has surprised many Royal Family friends that in this special year when the Queen reached her magnificent 90-year milestone and Prince Philip turned 95, two of their great-grandchildren Prince George, aged three, and Princess Charlotte, 18 months, will not be with them.
They will be 170 miles away in the village of Bucklebury, Berkshire, at the home of their grandparents Michael and Carole Middleton. This is because Prince William decided that this year he and his family should be with his in-laws.
Clearly, William has his grandmother's blessing.
Conscious of his closeness to the Middletons, and the pleasure he gets from their relaxed company, she would never say no.
But it signals the end of a tradition. In its place we are witnessing the tale of two Christmases - one distinctively royal; the other decidedly middle-class. And yet both involve serving turkey and the usual trimmings to the three expected future monarchs.
Amusingly, it should be noted that while only one future king - Charles - will be at the Queen's table in Norfolk, two future kings - William and George - will be at the table of Carole Middleton, who was brought up in a council flat, in Berkshire.
Such senior Royal Family separations were never allowed to happen when William was a child.
He and brother Harry - who will be at Sandringham as usual, no doubt pining for his girlfriend Meghan Markle, who is back at home across the Atlantic after a fleeting visit to London - never spent a single Christmas at Althorp, their mother Diana's ancestral home, while their grandfather, the 8th Earl Spencer was alive.
The fact is that 34-year-old William has a lifetime of memories of Christmas at Sandringham, not all of them, it must be said, happy ones.
Indeed, 20 years ago, at Christmas 1996 - the last one before her death - Princess Diana chose to stay away altogether. She signed 250 Christmas cards - a fraction of the 1,000 she used to send - and as William, Harry and Prince Charles were arriving at Sandringham, Diana was on her way to the Caribbean, slipping out of the country on Christmas Eve and flying economy.
Her companion was private assistant Victoria Mendham and her destination a £1,700-a night suite at the K-Club in Barbuda.
Camilla, Prince Charles, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip will be at Sandringham for festivities as usual. Photo / Getty Images
It was the first time she had been out of the country for the entire Christmas holiday and missing the joy of the boys opening their presents.
But after the icy indifference of other Royal Family figures in previous years, Diana could not face even the briefest of visits to Sandringham.
In different circumstances, she would have loved them, of course. William had recently received a 'fantastic' school report from Eton which she would have been proud to share.
Instead, she took a handful of presents from friends - among them a CD of the music from the then newly-released film Evita - and used the time to begin planning her landmines clearance campaign, which was to be her last big project.
She phoned her sons, of course. And made it a jokey conversation as she revealed that she faced some serious competition in the bikini stakes because the Wonderbra model Caprice was due to arrive at her resort.
She later explained that William, then only 14, was old enough to understand the reasons she had escaped abroad because of the chilly discomfort she'd suffered at the Christmas Sandringham gatherings that had followed her separation from Prince Charles.
The truth is that Diana had never felt she was welcome in those difficult years and it was noticeable among the assembled Royal Family that the atmosphere lightened when she was absent. Not exactly the season of goodwill.
But that is all in the past. These days, contrary to misconceptions based on the traditional brevity of the royal lunch, Christmas is a jolly time at Sandringham, particularly for children.
Which is why William's young family will be so sorely missed.
George and Charlotte would have had the exuberant company of Princess Anne's granddaughter Mia Tindall - who will be three next month - and enjoyed the attentions of Lady Louise Windsor, 13, and James, Viscount Severn, nine, the children of Prince Edward and Sophie.
The children are always entranced by the giant Christmas tree, cut from the royal estate and never less than 20ft tall, in the white drawing room, colourfully decorated by the staff and always finished off by the Queen. Though these days she no longer climbs the ladder to put the star at the top.
Only once has there been a disaster with the tree. That was in 2008 when a footman tripped and fell into it, bringing it crashing down in a mess of pine needles and shattered baubles just 30 minutes before the Queen was due to give it the final touches.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are breaking tradition by not spending Christmas Day with the Queen. Photo / Getty Images
Following the German tradition of opening presents on Christmas Eve, today is the big day.
At 5pm, guests help themselves to tea from sideboards in the baronial drawing room known as the Saloon - Earl Grey, a special blend of Indian for the Queen, scones, sandwiches, toasting muffins and chocolate cake - which they all eat at pushed-together card tables.
Earlier on, each royal is responsible for ensuring that his or her presents are placed on white cloth-covered trestle tables near the tree. A discreet name card marks each person's pile.
By 6pm, guests are back around the tree where, with a nod from the Queen, there is a free-for-all of tearing wrapping paper and - especially from the children - screams of unbridled delight.
Presents, however, for a family who by and large have everything, are never extravagant.
They are always something practical; rubber gloves and tea towels, something for the barbecue or an apron have all been gleefully unwrapped.
The gifts for William and Kate, however, will be left under the tree to be opened when they arrive at Sandringham in a few days.
Meanwhile, at the Middletons, there will be no footmen to dress the tree - rumoured to be a 10ft Nordmann - no housemaids to unpack William and Kate's bags; no valets to draw the baths; though under Carole Middleton's sharp eye, the attention to detail will be no less.
Mrs Middleton, whose mother Dorothy was the granddaughter of a miner, is a perfectionist, and her £4.8 million Georgian mansion is said by friends to be always 'exquisitely decorated' for Christmas. Nothing is left to chance. At Christmases past, Michael Middleton, who used to be a British Airways dispatcher, always did something unexpected to entertain the couple's children, Kate, Pippa and James.
On one occasion, he donned an inflatable sumo wrestler's fancy dress outfit. On another he dressed as Santa and walked across the garden with a sack of presents thrown over his shoulder.
Pippa, who will be spending her last family Christmas before marrying wealthy hedge fund boss James Matthews, has described the Middleton Christmas as 'magical'.
She has recalled a house filled with "bowls brimming with walnuts, shiny wrapped chocolates and piles of clementines". The atmosphere was always relaxed and homely. This, of course, is what William was craving all his life, and only found when he stepped into 'Mike' - as he calls Kate's father - and Carole's home as Kate's boyfriend.
It is what he is seeking again this Christmas. For no matter how hard they try, no Royal Family Christmas presided over by the Queen can completely throw off the air of formality and the strict timetable which governs it. Oh yes, and the changes of clothes for the evening.
"The Queen fully understands William's decision," says a former senior aide. "She trusts the Middletons. They epitomise the kind of people who have worked hard to make a success of their lives."
This is why she has allowed these in-laws to take such a uniquely hands-on role in the upbringing of her great-grandchildren.
Carole has had great fun carrying George around on her shoulders, though he is beginning to get too big for that now.
Indeed, the Queen fully approves of the way, as grandparents, Mike and Carole are involved with George and Charlotte's upbringing.
How close this arrangement would have been to Diana's wishes. For as the new entrant from an earlier generation into the Royal Family, she made sure her sons knew about life beyond palace walls. In the same way, William is anxious for George and Charlotte to be, as one in his circle puts it, "fully rounded people in the real world".
So relaxed has the unlikely relationship between the Windsor and Middleton families become, that Carole Middleton was confident enough to arrange a shoot on Boxing Day. This is the day on which for many years Prince Philip has organised a shoot on Sandringham's 20,000-acre estate - one which, in recent times, he has deputed William to organise.
How very odd, in the circumstances, that this year William will not be among the guns, but shooting elsewhere - especially as he and Kate live in Anmer, just a few miles from the Queen's Sandringham estate.
Carole Middleton is understood to have paid almost £10,000 for a day's shooting of partridge and pheasant on the Yattendon Estate in nearby Thatcham.
There will be a party of nine guns, including Pippa's fiance and brother James, blazing away, with a break for lunch in a shooting lodge, and expecting to bag at least 200 birds.
And to think that until William came into the family, the Middletons didn't even shoot.
Meanwhile, across the country, Prince Philip - who no longer shoots himself - has asked his son Edward to oversee the Sandringham shoot, which has been known to bag 500 birds in a day.
The only other time William and Kate have missed the royal Christmas celebrations was in 2012 when she was pregnant with George and suffering from an acute form of morning sickness, hyperemesis gravidarum.
But she was well enough to join William and her family at the local church, St. Mark's, at Englefield, on Christmas morning, and then to attend the Queen's party at the Boxing Day shoot.
Both families are likely to be at divine worship at the same church, while the Queen leads the royal gathering, as ever, to St Mary Magdalene in Sandringham.
They may be apart, but this being Christmas Day they will no doubt be in each other's thoughts.
